In many legal systems across the world, lawyers and other legal professionals research laws and past court decisions to help them serve the legal needs of their clients. To assist these legal professionals, businesses, such as Thomson Reuters, provide online legal research services, such as the popular Westlaw service, that provides not only rich databases and technically advanced search tools, but also sophisticated case analysis and alert functions. Thomson Reuters provides similar online legal research services in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
One problem that the present inventors recognized is that developing and providing online legal research services, particularly the software applications that actually make it possible to deliver the services, is time consuming and expensive. Moreover, when providing these applications in multiple countries, which have different languages, laws and ways of organizing and researching laws and past legal decisions, the time and expense multiplies. The magnitude of these costs raises the question of whether the cost for developing or even updating a research application for smaller country, such as Argentina, Denmark, or Spain is justified given the size of the legal market and desire to achieve a reasonable return on investment.
Accordingly, the present inventors recognized a need for better ways of building online legal research applications.